I'm going to move a reply to something over from Market Action, because the people I'm talking about don't participate in the market at all (short or long).
It seems that Elon's behavior has been very polarizing of late, and the younger generation doesn't seem to be bothered by it as much as others. We are in our 40s and have found Elon's behavior of late unfortunate.
TBH, I'm not sure about that. Many - maybe even most - of the 20-somethings that I know
HATE Musk. (I'm 30, for what it's worth.)
The narrative that they've bought into is massively informed by the FUD, and that's not helped by the fact that FUD sometimes has its roots in pieces of truth distorted to create a far worse narrative. This narrative may actually be
more vitriolic than the shorts' narrative, tbh. (Some of the FUD doesn't work on them - for instance, his puff on Rogan's podcast is seen as neutral at worst, because these people are extremely strongly against marijuana prohibition. But a lot of it works
extremely well.)
What it boils down to is... he's seen as one of the arch-techbros - basically, someone who only cares about technology and money, and perpetuates a "good ol' boys club" of craven money-grabbing at the expense of everyone else, and exclusion of women. (Which, there is a
lot of that in Bay Area startup culture.) And, worse, he has a cult of personality (although much of the media is no longer part of it), which... the 20-somethings that I know have a revulsion for cults of personality (and I don't blame them).
His environmental concern is seen as a complete and total lie - the narrative on this boils down to something like this: Tesla isn't meant to improve things on Earth at all, it's instead meant to make playthings for the rich, and divert money to Musk's personal fortune, to fund the BFR so that he can ditch Earth when it becomes a smoking hellhole. (I think the Model 3 Standard Range shipping won't end the "playthings for the rich" narrative among this group, either, even as the Long Range car weakens it in the mainstream, although it'll
help it - some in this group see a base $35k Model 3 as just as unrealistically expensive as a $150k Model X P100DL.)
Similarly, Boring Company and Hyperloop are simply seen as distractions from real, effective mass transit, meant to enrich Musk at everyone else's expense. (I mean, frankly, I actually agree that Boring Company and to an extent Hyperloop are distractions from real, effective mass transit. I think Musk is merely trying to solve the wrong problems, some of this due to his living in a billionaire bubble, but I don't ascribe
malice to it. And, the hype behind Hyperloop may be what's needed to implement an effective long-distance high-speed rail network in the US, where there's no political will to implement publicly-funded high-speed rail, and nobody willing to set billions on fire to build privately-funded conventional high-speed rail.)
He's seen as massively abusive towards his partners (to the point that I saw a lot of sentiment expressed that Grimes was making a terrible mistake), as well as his employees. There is a
massive amount of support for the labor rights movement among the 20-somethings that I know, and they've
fully bought into the Reveal article. (TBH, I would not work for Musk, I don't want the kind of work-life balance that working for him would entail, and I think that that's a problem... although a fair amount of the problem is inherently the amount of work it takes to get started up and challenge incumbents in a market. But, I don't buy into the narrative that Tesla is a particularly
dangerous place to work at all.)
Also, their baseline of believing that Musk is fundamentally dishonest means that a lot of these people were happy with the SEC suit against him, seeing it as the SEC finally doing their job against a fraud. There's a lack of understanding of details of how things work in the financial markets, though - I think many thought that the reason for the SEC lawsuit was that the "funding secured" tweet was a pump-and-dump scheme against longs, which we here all know isn't the case. (Basically, these people aren't shorts or longs, there's disgust against the stock market in general among these people, as it's seen as part of the mechanism of wealth transfer from the poor and the middle class to the rich.)
So, yeah, assuming that younger people aren't subject to the FUD is... dangerous, IMO.
